Convergence (update: finished!)

phydeaux! Great to see you're still around here. I remember Nanocrisis quite fondly! Thanks a lot for the feedback. Levels and game balance are the very last thing I have to do (bad prioritization, I know!), so hopefully the things you mentioned will get fixed in the next 24 hours. I'd originally planned to do some much nicer graphics, but just didn't have enough time, so I polished up the basic geometry I had as best I could.

All of the rooms you'll see in the dungeon in this build are completely new. The previous dungeon's difficulty was too high to start out, and it'll now be the second floor once I finish retuning it. For now, the staircase that would take you to the second floor simply ends the game.

In addition to the new dungeon, I fixed up all of the front end stuff to at least somewhat presentable form for the contest. In-game instructions should be complete. Menu screens can now be controlled with the keyboard. The configure controls screen, while still confusing, has a bunch of text on it now telling you how to use it. Control configurations are saved. Fullscreen toggle added to preferences. Pause screen added.

With the extra day of development, I'll mostly be building levels and fine-tuning the game balance. If I have time, I'll see if I can pretty up the menu screens a bit, since they stick out pretty badly as half-assed programmer art. Other than that, my to-do list is dwindling satisfyingly down to nothing!

(Oct 1, 2011 05:45 PM)ThemsAllTook Wrote: phydeaux! Great to see you're still around here. I remember Nanocrisis quite fondly!

Hey! I remember Water Tower 3d fondly as well- it was definitely in the 'underappreciated' category. I tried out the new build- the difficulty seems about the same, though I did finally beat that one boss with Berserker, which was satisfying. I hope the game does well in the competition.

I've built enough levels that I feel satisfied with it for the contest. The first floor of the dungeon is basically the same as in the last build. The second floor is a little bit larger than the first, with an (I hope) gentle but firm difficulty increase. The third floor is mostly just the final boss fight - he's a doozy!

I've tweaked some of the class mechanics to be a bit more fluid. In particular, the duelist is much nicer to play because you can now attack without releasing the block button. It lets your guard down for the duration of the attack, of course, but you don't have to do the awkward dance of release-block press-attack press-block every time. I went through a thorough tweaking and game balancing process last night, and I made sure this didn't make the duelist too overpowered.

Other than the levels and duelist change, it was pretty much all bugfixes and polish. I never did get around to making the splash screen any prettier (and I don't have any good ideas for it, anyway), so the huge pixely text will just have to do. I'm sure I'll be making small fixes here and there during the voting period, but I'm pretty comfortable shipping this version as it is. Feels great to finally be done!

1. Love the graphics. If I were voting as a peer, I’m not sure how fair it would be to rank them high since they weren’t smashtastically realistic, but I personally love them. One of the games I most enjoyed was Spectre Challenger, which had graphics about as simple as you can get, but the gameplay and controls were awesome(Convergence actually kind of brings it to mind).
2. Gameplay is great. If you were to extend the game(i.e add some more levels and a story and some music), I think it would make a great shareware title(I would personally buy it in a heartbeat).
3. An indicator of the keys you’re holding would be nice - I’d like a way to know if I have a key besides running into a doorway.
4. All of the above should be taken with a grain of salt, as I actually liked the huge pixely text.

Overall, really great game. I’ve put it into my games folder for later enjoyment - would love to see it developed further if you have any plans in that regard. And congrats on making the deadline!

Thanks for the feedback! You're the first player I've heard about to have gotten as far as the final boss, so congrats on that. I do wonder if I've overdone the difficulty a bit... I don't really want to make any significant nerfs, but I am working on adding something that lets you retry after dying without having to start at the beginning again. I'm going to try to have an update out tonight or tomorrow with that feature in and a few fixes.

I'm definitely planning to develop this more beyond the contest version. I have a basic outline for the game story, but decided to leave it out for uDevGames and just focus on really getting the core gameplay to feel good. Similarly with the graphics and music, I just wanted to do something minimal that didn't look or sound too terrible for the moment, and think about replacing them with real assets later. I'll go into more detail about all of this in the game's postmortem. Hopefully in the coming months I'll be posting about a more fleshed-out continuation of the game with all the goods in it.

I have mixed feelings about this, since it removes a good portion of the game's difficulty, but it doesn't feel right to have to start *all* the way at the beginning after dying once either. A limited lives system would seem antiquated, and I didn't want to go to all of the trouble of adding a checkpoint object and placing it appropriately throughout the dungeon. What I'd probably like to do would be to keep this system, but record the player's deaths and time taken and challenge them to finish the game with as little of both as possible with each class. Hopefully this will be good enough for now, though!

I was able to finish the new final boss with the Ranger but the other classes I got frustrated when I had to start over from the very beginning and haven't bothered putting the time into finishing with them yet. Definitely multiple tries on the same level would help.

(Oct 4, 2011 06:40 PM)phydeaux Wrote: I downloaded the newest version and man is the boss hard with berserker. After I finished the game, it crashed. To be fair, I didn't expect me to be able to do it, either.

(Oct 8, 2011 03:00 AM)Ingemar Wrote: Surprisingly playable for the crude graphics. The boss was pretty impossible (are you supposed to respawn with almost no health?) but otherwise it was better than I first expected.

It's a shame I never got around to properly replacing the graphics. Hopefully they're not too off-putting for people trying out the game. As for health after a respawn, you'll end up with whatever you had when you last entered the room. I thought of refilling it to full, but I felt like that would make death feel almost like a reward...instead, you simply go back in time to where you were a bit ago, so you still have to pay at least some attention to your health in the game.

Wow, this is great! It's always interesting to read someone else's perspective on the game, especially in this much detail. I was pleased to see you mention some of the stuff I was afraid no one would really notice, like gamepad support. Thanks for the review!

Wow, this is great! It's always interesting to read someone else's perspective on the game, especially in this much detail. I was pleased to see you mention some of the stuff I was afraid no one would really notice, like gamepad support. Thanks for the review!

My pleasure! I'm interested in the USB game pad support. Is that hard to do?